Journal

Duke of Zamorna and finally King of Angria. The early Glass Town, as its
name suggests, was relatively fanciful, based on biblical imagery from the Book
of Revelation with its celestial city of light and precious stones. But by the age
of 19, she had become considerably more realistic, engaged with examining
human relationships and especially the love affairs of her Byronic hero
Zamorna and the many beautiful women who worshipped him. She was able
to conjure up visions of her imaginary world, to see her characters in her
‘mind’s eye’ and then write about them. This creative life became solace and
security for her, but it also led to a fixation on Zamorna and his affairs. In fact
Charlotte became obsessive about her own creation and, like the later Jane Eyre,
worried that she had made an idol of her ‘mental King’. She increasingly saw
her beloved Glass Town and Angria, her ‘bright darling dream’, as sinful,
referring to it now as ‘the infernal world’ and ‘the world below’. 7
But she could not confess this sin to anyone. She could not relinquish her
secret imaginary world, since it was this dream world that sustained her
through what she called ‘the wretched bondage’, her life as a teacher at Roe
Head. This meant that she began to live in two conflicting worlds, so that the
intrusion of the one upon the other had the force of physical pain. She
records in her Roe Head journal: ‘All this day I have been in a dream, half
miserable and half ecstatic: miserable because I could not follow it out
uninterruptedly; ecstatic because it shewed almost in the vivid light of reality
the ongoings of the infernal world’. 8 When her Angrian dream is interrupted
by some unsuspecting pupil she writes angrily: ‘But just then a Dolt came up
with a lesson, I thought I should have vomited.’ The disjunction between the
dismal real world and her creative life was extreme. She despised her pupils
and she wished that she had ‘the lofty faith’ of St Stephen who in his
martyrdom was able to bless his foes. 9 She found some relief in writing
confessional letters to her pious friend Ellen Nussey that tell only half the
story of her religious melancholia at this time. She writes—
If you knew my thoughts; the dreams that absorb me; and the fiery
imagination that at times eats me up and makes me feel Society as it is,
wretchedly insipid you would pity and I dare say despise me. But Ellen I
know the treasures of the Bible I love and adore them. I can see the Well
of Life in all its clearness and brightness; but when I stoop down to
drink of the pure waters they fly from my lips as if I were Tantalus. 10
She feels divorced from Christ’s saving grace. She agonizes over whether her
supplication to Christ is motivated by a contrite heart or merely by her inward
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